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Computer Pioneer Dennis Ritchie Dies

Ritchie, center, accepts the National Medal of Technology from former President Bill Clinton.

Last week Dennis Ritchie, the co-creator of UNIX, died — and
hardly anyone covered it.

Ritchie lived quietly — he wasn't the showman that Steve
Jobs was — and apparently he died quietly, too. While working at Bell Labs in
the late ‘60s Ritchie wrote the C programming language with Brian Kernighan. He
then used it to create the UNIX operating system with fellow programmers
Kernighan, Ken Thompson, Douglas McIlroy and Joe Ossanna. It wasn't the first
operating system, but it is arguably the best.
While the others have passed out of existence — except Windows, which
many of us hope will pass out of existence — UNIX lives on.

UNIX’s most endearing quality is that it’s stable: It rarely
crashes. It’s also fast (designed and written for maximum efficiency), comprehensive
(it’s powerful and can be made even more powerful through the addition of
modules) and easy to upgrade (due to its modular nature you don’t have to
rewrite and redistribute the operating system every time you want to make a
change).

When UNIX moved from the shareware world to the commercial
world and became unaffordable to many consumers, a young programmer named Linus
Torvalds stepped in and rescued it by recreating it as open-source free software —
a tribute to UNIX’s elegance and power and its importance to the computer world
and the people in it. In 2002 the folks at Apple wisely realized they could
never create a better system, so they trashed their operating system and
rebuilt a new interface to UNIX — what we now call OSX.

From the start, the UNIX operating system has been the main
operating system used in most of the servers at the core of the Internet. So
here's to Dennis Ritchie, without whom it's hard to imagine the Internet as we
know it.

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